Hot LinkWhile surfing the internet for some interesting ideas for your next blog post or your myspace page (And I’m specifically looking at you in this instance), you see a cool image and think, I could use that. Without further thought you copy the image location and link to it from your site (so the image looks like its on your site). This is called Hotlinking (or bandwidth theft).

2 Reasons why you shouldn’t hotlink :

  1. The old switcheroo - Which is when the image you hotlink to is changed, sometimes for humorous results, sometimes not. Yes it can be amusing for the webmaster to change an image, but if the image violates your hosts policies it can offend your readers and get your site shut down.
  2. Violation of copyright - Possibly the more serious of the two. If you don’t own the rights or have the right to publish an image on your site, you can have legal proceedings against you which can be costly and again have your site shut down. By hotlinking you are also leading the site straight to you as it slaps a nice referal link in their stats.

So why am I so interested in hotlinking? Well some kind person from MySpace, with a popular profile, has decided to hotlink some of my images, this morning alone the image had over 2000 views, eating up my bandwidth and resources. I try to only use images I am allowed to use, for example stock images and images covered by the ‘fair use’ rules in the US.

If you are hotlinking my images, do me a favour and right click, save as, and upload the image to your site (This isn’t me giving permission to use the image, but if you are going to steal it, do it properly). I may in due course change all my images to get some nice free advertising on your site if you don’t >:)

Posted by admin in buried